Alan Keyes
How scientistic propaganda has miseducated Christians
By Alan Keyes
"Nothing under the sun is new, neither is any man able to say: Behold this is new; for it hath already gone before in the ages that were before us." (Ecclesiastes 1:10)
Is the whole present crisis of the United States due to the fact that many Americans who profess to be followers of Christ fail to walk the path he exampled for us? The Scripture reports that Christ had the power to transform material things, changing water into wine. He had the power to heal physical infirmities – to make the blind see and the lame walk. He could restore life to those who were dead, in every sense the human body could perceive. He could control he weather – calming the storm and transforming troubled waters into a firmament stable enough to stand and walk upon. With a blessing, he could make a few loaves and fishes suffice to feed thousands.
These feats once seemed beyond the reach of ordinary humanity – yet according to the creed most Christians profess, Christ performed them as a human being, albeit one who was nonetheless true, in substance, to the being of Being itself, which God is. Christ called upon all who were willing to heed him to make the perfection of God their standard of living. People can be excused if, for many centuries, they assumed that this was simply a metaphor. Yet in the past two centuries, human understanding has more and more discovered, in the God-endowed nature of material things, ways to produce results that hark back to the astonishing miracles attributed to the power of God in Christ.
For decades, the promoters of godless secularism have promoted the idea that human beings are now responsible for the use of powers never before imagined – powers that require the total transformation of human consciousness, powers that imply "evolution" beyond humanity, toward being superhuman. We must, therefore, imagine, impose, and accept new modes and orders, never before imagined – ways entirely incompatible with the ethics, conscience, and sensitivities of the weak, limited, almost contemptible "nature" of human existence, before the prospect of wielding godlike constructive and destructive power became something more than myth and fantasy.
This kind of pridefully secularist, scientistic propaganda has miseducated many people who profess to be followers of Christ, including some who are esteemed to be in authority in various churches and denominations. In consequence of this miseducation, they first invented, and have recently been seeking to impose, an understanding of Christian doctrine that purports to be a necessary response to our scientifically impelled evolution beyond the nature of humanity. So, they now openly promote the premise of the aforementioned secular propagandists, that the prospect of power we must now entertain renders old doctrines, bound by past concepts of humanity, obsolete. Into the old wineskins of Christian teachings about every aspect of human existence, we must pour the new wine of teachings reinvented to take account of hitherto unimagined possibilities of power, authority, and responsibility now in our grasp, or within our reach.
The disciples of these new doctrines pretend to offer their innovations under the rubric of "science" (as in Pope Francis' newly minted replacement for the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage, dubbed the "Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences"). According to this doctrine, since the discoveries of empirical science have confronted us with novel prospects of power, theology must approach all questions heretofore constrained by the assumption of God-endowed nature in a new way that takes account of those prospects and of the "evolution" beyond previous imagining they entail.
These purveyors of a purportedly novel doctrine are counting on the fact that the secularist propagandists, by abusing authority supposedly gleaned from the "miracles" of modern science, have cowed many Christians into a way of reading the Scriptures that glosses over passages that recount the miracles of old, or at best seeks to explain them away. Being thus ashamed of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, they fail to ponder what was, in many respects, the most challenging aspect of his instruction.
Christ clearly foresaw the relationship of Divine and human power these prideful secularists pretend is so novel. Indeed, in his very existence Christ, embodied it. He was the Son of God who repeatedly referred to himself as the Son of Man – thereby affirming the consubstantial unity of his Divine and human nature. Some Christians have never accepted this affirmation, holding that the impure, imperfect nature of humanity is immiscible with the purely perfect Being of God. But Christ not only affirmed this consubstantiality in himself. He told those willing to listen to him to live according to its meaning. For he instructed us, saying "You are to be perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect."
Christ did not see the perfection of God as something simply beyond the reach of the children of Man he was instructing. And when his disciples came to him, embarrassed because they could not imitate his miraculous powers, Christ did not rebuke their presumption. Instead, he again instructed them. His instruction encompassed his power to heal, his power over natural creatures, even his power over supernatural beings. With prayer and fasting, in the presence of the wholehearted trust in God which is faith, he made it clear that those who truly accepted and in action heeded him would be responsible for wielding powers consonant with the wisdom of the Word itself, through which all things were made.
Christ's example, his instructions, his commands, already teach all who are willing to walk in his way what they need to know to wield powers like those of the Creator, God Himself. Therefore, taken in the way Christ intended, the Gospel has, from the first, prepared Christians to wield, in Spirit and in Truth, the kind of power our empirical science is now beginning to understand in material terms. His teaching even foreshadows the day when we will know, in fact, that our very thoughts transcend the distinction between thought and action we still take for granted. Isn't this the implication of his instruction when he says: "But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Matthew 5:28); or when he says, "If you have even a grain of faith, when you say to the mulberry tree 'Be uprooted and plant yourself in the sea,' it heeds you."
This is power akin to the power by which God said, "Be light," and light came to be. So, the powers we now envisage, to heal or to destroy, were not only imagined in Christ's teaching, they were assumed and fully taken into account.
So were the keys to making responsible use of them, to wit: to love God with the totality of our being and, therefore, obey his commands; and to love others as we love the Son of God, the Redeemer who came to save us and all God-ordered existence. Our science has made progress in understanding the rules that impel, order, and arrange the cosmos. But can it fathom the Ruler's love, which gives the cosmos meaning? Isn't God's love the spirit-filled heart of wisdom, beyond all knowing (Ephesians 3:19), by which those in Christ retrieved are brought to rest in God, and God alone? (Philippians 4:7)
September 25, 2017
"Nothing under the sun is new, neither is any man able to say: Behold this is new; for it hath already gone before in the ages that were before us." (Ecclesiastes 1:10)
Is the whole present crisis of the United States due to the fact that many Americans who profess to be followers of Christ fail to walk the path he exampled for us? The Scripture reports that Christ had the power to transform material things, changing water into wine. He had the power to heal physical infirmities – to make the blind see and the lame walk. He could restore life to those who were dead, in every sense the human body could perceive. He could control he weather – calming the storm and transforming troubled waters into a firmament stable enough to stand and walk upon. With a blessing, he could make a few loaves and fishes suffice to feed thousands.
These feats once seemed beyond the reach of ordinary humanity – yet according to the creed most Christians profess, Christ performed them as a human being, albeit one who was nonetheless true, in substance, to the being of Being itself, which God is. Christ called upon all who were willing to heed him to make the perfection of God their standard of living. People can be excused if, for many centuries, they assumed that this was simply a metaphor. Yet in the past two centuries, human understanding has more and more discovered, in the God-endowed nature of material things, ways to produce results that hark back to the astonishing miracles attributed to the power of God in Christ.
For decades, the promoters of godless secularism have promoted the idea that human beings are now responsible for the use of powers never before imagined – powers that require the total transformation of human consciousness, powers that imply "evolution" beyond humanity, toward being superhuman. We must, therefore, imagine, impose, and accept new modes and orders, never before imagined – ways entirely incompatible with the ethics, conscience, and sensitivities of the weak, limited, almost contemptible "nature" of human existence, before the prospect of wielding godlike constructive and destructive power became something more than myth and fantasy.
This kind of pridefully secularist, scientistic propaganda has miseducated many people who profess to be followers of Christ, including some who are esteemed to be in authority in various churches and denominations. In consequence of this miseducation, they first invented, and have recently been seeking to impose, an understanding of Christian doctrine that purports to be a necessary response to our scientifically impelled evolution beyond the nature of humanity. So, they now openly promote the premise of the aforementioned secular propagandists, that the prospect of power we must now entertain renders old doctrines, bound by past concepts of humanity, obsolete. Into the old wineskins of Christian teachings about every aspect of human existence, we must pour the new wine of teachings reinvented to take account of hitherto unimagined possibilities of power, authority, and responsibility now in our grasp, or within our reach.
The disciples of these new doctrines pretend to offer their innovations under the rubric of "science" (as in Pope Francis' newly minted replacement for the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage, dubbed the "Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences"). According to this doctrine, since the discoveries of empirical science have confronted us with novel prospects of power, theology must approach all questions heretofore constrained by the assumption of God-endowed nature in a new way that takes account of those prospects and of the "evolution" beyond previous imagining they entail.
These purveyors of a purportedly novel doctrine are counting on the fact that the secularist propagandists, by abusing authority supposedly gleaned from the "miracles" of modern science, have cowed many Christians into a way of reading the Scriptures that glosses over passages that recount the miracles of old, or at best seeks to explain them away. Being thus ashamed of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, they fail to ponder what was, in many respects, the most challenging aspect of his instruction.
Christ clearly foresaw the relationship of Divine and human power these prideful secularists pretend is so novel. Indeed, in his very existence Christ, embodied it. He was the Son of God who repeatedly referred to himself as the Son of Man – thereby affirming the consubstantial unity of his Divine and human nature. Some Christians have never accepted this affirmation, holding that the impure, imperfect nature of humanity is immiscible with the purely perfect Being of God. But Christ not only affirmed this consubstantiality in himself. He told those willing to listen to him to live according to its meaning. For he instructed us, saying "You are to be perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect."
Christ did not see the perfection of God as something simply beyond the reach of the children of Man he was instructing. And when his disciples came to him, embarrassed because they could not imitate his miraculous powers, Christ did not rebuke their presumption. Instead, he again instructed them. His instruction encompassed his power to heal, his power over natural creatures, even his power over supernatural beings. With prayer and fasting, in the presence of the wholehearted trust in God which is faith, he made it clear that those who truly accepted and in action heeded him would be responsible for wielding powers consonant with the wisdom of the Word itself, through which all things were made.
Christ's example, his instructions, his commands, already teach all who are willing to walk in his way what they need to know to wield powers like those of the Creator, God Himself. Therefore, taken in the way Christ intended, the Gospel has, from the first, prepared Christians to wield, in Spirit and in Truth, the kind of power our empirical science is now beginning to understand in material terms. His teaching even foreshadows the day when we will know, in fact, that our very thoughts transcend the distinction between thought and action we still take for granted. Isn't this the implication of his instruction when he says: "But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Matthew 5:28); or when he says, "If you have even a grain of faith, when you say to the mulberry tree 'Be uprooted and plant yourself in the sea,' it heeds you."
This is power akin to the power by which God said, "Be light," and light came to be. So, the powers we now envisage, to heal or to destroy, were not only imagined in Christ's teaching, they were assumed and fully taken into account.
So were the keys to making responsible use of them, to wit: to love God with the totality of our being and, therefore, obey his commands; and to love others as we love the Son of God, the Redeemer who came to save us and all God-ordered existence. Our science has made progress in understanding the rules that impel, order, and arrange the cosmos. But can it fathom the Ruler's love, which gives the cosmos meaning? Isn't God's love the spirit-filled heart of wisdom, beyond all knowing (Ephesians 3:19), by which those in Christ retrieved are brought to rest in God, and God alone? (Philippians 4:7)
To see more articles by Dr. Keyes, visit his blog at LoyalToLiberty.com and his commentary at WND.com and BarbWire.com.
© Alan KeyesThe views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
